If you’re in need of some inspiration to freshen up your blues phrasing or looking to add a little jazz-like colour, John Wheatcroft is back with another blues lesson which will help you broaden melodic, rhythmic and improvisational horizons. In this part we are demonstrating Major Jazz Blues.

If you’re in need of some inspiration to freshen up your blues phrasing or looking to add a little jazz-like colour, John Wheatcroft is back with another series of 3 blues lessons which will help you broaden melodic, rhythmic and improvisational horizons. In part 2 we are demonstrating Latin Blues inspired by Allan Holdsworth, Bireli Lagrene and John Scofield.

If you’re in need of some inspiration to freshen up your blues phrasing or looking to add a little jazz-like colour, John Wheatcroft is back with another series of 3 blues lessons which will help you broaden melodic, rhythmic and improvisational horizons. All 3 parts will include full audio examples (rhythm, solo, backing tracks), PDF and Sibelius tabs and textual explanation with scales and tips.

Hi. This is my first lesson at Live4guitar and I’d like to offer it for free. It is the C major scale played in triplets using three notes per string up and down the entire neck (22 frets).

This lesson is meant to improve:

- The knowledge of the natural notes on the fret-board;
- The alternate picking;
- The coordination between left and right hand;
- The recognition of the major sound and its modes;
- The improvising approach.

In the last article of this series we'll see some more superlocrian action. Altered intervals give a functioning dominant chord a greater push along the way to the next change so our superlocrian can be used at this point too. John Scofield and Scott Henderson are both masters at balancing this jazzy tension and release whilst still retaining a strong blues feel to their playing.

Of all the guitar techniques, tapping is probably the most potent when it comes to making high speed interval jumps, scale movements, polyphony and polyrhythms. Tapping is a legato technique which means it incorporates hammer-ons and pull-offs for tone production. Instead of the usual playing approach using 4 fingers, 8-finger tapping allows you to use up to 4+4 fingers independently (especially useful for extended range guitarists). Being an 8-finger tapper has a lot of benefits and presents us with an ever-increasing range of possibilities.

Labelled ‘the thinking man’s blues player’, Robben Ford has an original twist on the minor pentatonic. He replaces the customary b7 with the brighter major 6, a note present in the major pentatonic. For this solo study I plumped for Ford’s hybrid pentatonic for all A7 chords.

In this part we’re in Larry Carlton territory for solo 3 and our first look at Vertical improvisation. Larry Carlton is a master at extracting all the juicy notes out of a scale without always running up and down in sequential order.

Does you blues soloing lack the melodic lyricism of Eric Clapton or SRV, or perhaps you’d like to add some slippery, modern dissonance like John Scofield or Scott Henderson? These series of articles explore the various ways you can use the architecture of a chord sequence to really spice up your soloing vocabulary and add an air of sophistication and real authority to your playing.

Does your blues soloing lack the melodic lyricism of Eric Clapton or SRV, or perhaps you’d like to add some slippery, modern dissonance like John Scofield or Scott Henderson? These series of articles explore the various ways you can use the architecture of a chord sequence to really spice up your soloing vocabulary and add an air of sophistication and real authority to your playing, Nailing the Changes. All solos follow the conventional 12 bar blues format in A, arranged to get more colourful harmonically as we progress. There’s no funny business with the chords, just I, IV, and V. Any inherent ‘Bluesy’ or ‘Jazzy’ feel is a result of the notes selected against the underlying changes. Study the relationship carefully and all of these tones can be at your disposal.